Dynamic Shadows, Dynamic Lights, Texture Filtering

Dynamic Shadows

On the opposite side, dynamic shadows sets the level of detail used for drawing shadows for moving objects like people, trees, foliage, and vehicles. Since most of the shadows you will actually pay attention to are people’s shadows, we feel there is a definite need to use a high setting here. However, the performance impact is dramatic as you go higher with this setting. That makes sense, as real time shadow calculations are going to tax your graphics card. The pictures below show you what this setting affects.

This one is easy... No Shadows

Shadows

1024x768 Performance Analysis

Dynamic Shadows has a huge performance hit when set to Medium and High, especially in areas of heavy traffic during gameplay. High-end cards can set this to max (>50fps with 2xAA). Mainstream and budget would be best off with Low (14-34fps).

1280x960 Performance Analysis

More pixels means less performance. Set the Mainstream cards to Low. Budget cards can be set to Off. The X850XT can be set to High but change to Medium for the 6800GT, especially if you want to utilize 2xAA.

Dynamic Lights

Dynamic Lights affects the way lighting is handled for making explosions, muzzle flashes, and fire look more realistic. The difference from setting it to low and to high is so unnoticeable that is does not warrant setting very high if your system can’t handle it. See if you can notice the difference between the different settings:

Bland, smoothed out, and unrealistic smoke and effects

Huge explosion, debris flying off the tank, much more detail!

1024x768 Performance Analysis

Dynamic Light has slightly less of a performance drop associated with it than Dynamic Shadows using higher settings. The 6800GT and the X850XT should be on High with 2xAA enabled. Mainstream can be set to Medium and Budget set to Low.

1280x960 Performance Analysis

The only trouble with the High-end cards were the lag that was noticed with the 6800GT when enabling 2xAA and using High as the setting (28-48fps during scenes). The X850XT did just fine (>50fps). The Mainstream cards should be using Medium except for the 6600GT and the X600XT which should utilize the Low options along with the Budget cards.

Texture Filtering

Battlefield 2’s texture filtering setting controls the type of texture filtering used. When this setting is set to “Low”, trilinear filtering is used. The “Medium” and “High” settings both use anisotropic filtering, with medium using 2xAF, and High, 4xAF.

Low quality setting

Looks much better here. You can see much more detail the farther you look down the road.

1024x768 Performance Analysis

If you’re into eye candy, you’re going to want to run this setting as high as you can. Recommendations would be High-end and Mainstream set to High and Budget set to Medium.

1280x960 Performance Analysis

Same thing applies to 1280x960. The only difference here is to apply the Low setting to the 6600GT with the budget cards.